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Faith at Work

March 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

As I get ready to transition out of Park with the soon-to-open new ministry center, I am reflecting a lot on my new role as the CEO of a new company FanFuego.com, the leading multi-sport social network for sports fans, and my leadership style and faith at work. I came across a great article in the New York Times from a while back that looks at the issue of faith in the marketplace, including an interesting inside look at Christians working at Intel.

The article talks about many examples of faith in the marketplace and has a seciton on the reporter’s visit where sixteen engineers and programmers sat around a table during lunch hour, eating pizza and sandwiches from the company cafeteria and discussing the Book of Ruth. William McSpadden, a 43-year-old design engineer, father of five and hardcore weekend soccer coach, led the Bible study. He describes the 200 or so local participants in the Intel Bible-Based Christian Network as ”about half conservative Christians, even fundamentalists, with the rest being Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics and the like.”

Intel has been in the forefront of public corporations that brought religion into the mix of their employee groups, thanks in part to the fact that one of its corporate heads, Patrick Gelsinger, its chief technology officer, is an evangelical Christian who has written a book on faith and work. The Bible network became an authorized company affinity group in 1997. There are four Bible-study sessions per week at the Intel – Jones Farm campus, where 4,700 of the company’s 15,000 employees work, plus special events and a monthly faith-at-work community-outreach gathering at a local Borders. ”When I started at Intel in 1983, we had an informal Bible-study group,” McSpadden says after the Bible-study meeting as he erases the whiteboard and his colleagues head back to work. ”The company probably didn’t even know it was going on. Its being formalized basically makes life easier. It means I can book a conference room without feeling I’m going against company wishes.”

Take a read here.

Filed Under: DifferenceMakers, Entrepreneuring, Faith at Work, Fanfuego.com, Internet Resources

Of Church and Steak: Farming for the Soul

March 8, 2008 By 1 Comment

Many of you know that I am a serial entrepreneur and I am in the process of getting my fifth company, Fanfuego.com, a multi-sport network for sports fans, off the ground. Prior to joining Park Community Church 2 years ago as the Executive Pastor, I invested in and helped co-found Dakota Beef LLC with Scott Lively (who met his wife while attending Park).

dakota beef

Dakota Beef is now the country’s largest organic beef company and you can buy our products at Costco’s all over the country (I am excited about that as I am still an investor!).

Or you can ORDER ONLINE HERE and have it delivered right to your door

Dakota Beef was recently featured in an article in the New York Times about the symbiotic relationship between Scott Lively, an evangelical, and two Hasidic Jews, who are customers of Dakota Beef. It also features a reference to Hope Egan of Park, who published an excellent book called “Holy Cow! Does God Care About What We Eat?”.

For those who do not have access to the NYT story, here is the reprint:

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NEAR a prairie dotted with cattle and green with soy beans, barley, corn and oats, two bearded Hasidic men dressed in black pray outside a slaughterhouse here that is managed by an evangelical Christian. What brought these men together could easily have kept them apart: religion.

The two Hasidim oversee shehitah, the Jewish ritual slaughtering of meat according to the Book of Leviticus. The meat is then shipped to Wise Organic Pastures, a kosher food company in Brooklyn owned by Issac Wiesenfeld and his family. When Mr. Wiesenfeld sought an organic processor that used humane methods five years ago, he found Scott Lively, who was just beginning Dakota Beef, now one of the largest organic meat processors in the country.

Mr. Lively adheres to a diet he believes Jesus followed. Like Mr. Wiesenfeld, he says the Bible prescribes that he use organic methods to respect the earth, treat his workers decently and treat the cattle that enter his slaughterhouse as humanely as possible. “We learn everything from the Old Testament,” Mr. Lively said, “from keeping kosher to responsible capitalism.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Culture and Faith, Entrepreneuring

Now Get 20 Million Minutes By Email!

March 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Are you flying around all week at work and would rather have any new posts from 20 Million Minutes sent directly to you by email or RSS? After a number of requests, we have now added both of those options to the 20 Million Minutes blog! All of our feeds have been migrated to Feedburner, which provides better options for you.

EMAIL:You can get an email sent to you whenever there is a new post. Just click here to go the the Feedburner feed and put in your email to get 20 Million Minutes delivered by email. Then, whenever a post is made to this blog, you will receive an email, right to your desktop once a day. It is that simple!

RSS FEEDS:

For those of you who are more tech-savvy, and are using a newsreader program to aggregate your information feeds, you can add this manually to your RSS news reader with the following URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevelavey or click here to go to the feed page and just click on the graphic of your new reader for easy, one-touch adding of this feed to any of the popular newsreaders (yahoo, google, newsgator, etc).

PASS IT ON TO YOUR FRIENDS!

If you know of someonethat would like to learn more about the city, faith and culture, church growth strategies, multi-site churches, etc, please pass on this post to them.

Filed Under: Breaking News, Entrepreneuring, Internet Resources
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